1. Field of Invention
Aspects of this invention are related to endoscopic imaging, and are more particularly related to overlaying an image on a stereoscopic real-time video display for a surgeon.
2. Related Art
The da Vinci® Surgical System, manufactured by Intuitive Surgical, Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., is a minimally invasive teleoperated surgical system that offers patients many benefits, such as reduced trauma to the body, faster recovery and shorter hospital stay. One key component of the da Vinci® Surgical System is a capability to provide two-channel (i.e., left and right) video capture and display of three-dimensional (3D) visible images that provides stereoscopic viewing for the surgeon.
Such electronic stereoscopic imaging systems may output high definition video images to the surgeon, and may allow features such as zoom to provide a “magnified” view that allows the surgeon to identify specific tissue types and characteristics, as well as to work with increased precision. However, techniques for instructing how to use a minimally invasive surgical system are generally restricted to oral communications.
Some prior work has looked at rendering three-dimensional visuals, such as ghost tools, to instruct a user how to operate slave instruments using a master manipulator in a minimally invasive surgical systems. While these methods are an improvement over oral communications alone, the methods do not provide the full expressiveness that can be obtained from natural and expressive gesturing by a human.
Some work has been reported that appears to use a constant color background to segment a video of a hand of a proctor and to display the segmented image in the field of view of a surgeon during normal open surgery. While this approach allows, for example, remote proctoring, the process is of questionable applicability for environments where use of a constant color background and/or open surgery are not practical.